Today’s post is from our friend and frequent guest contributor <Matt Ridings, Founder of MSR Consulting. He’s a thought leader on integrating social media into the realm of business design and relationship marketing. He blogs over at Techguerilla, and you can find him on Twitter at @techguerilla.
Take a look at your front lines for a moment. Those initial contact points within your organization that create a first impression. An impression that will either give you an advantage, or that you must struggle to overcome.
A lot of attention is placed on customer service when this topic comes up, and rightfully so as it represents the highest volume of direct contact with your customers. But you must remember that all of your personnel once had their own ‘first contact’ with your company.
Actions Speak Loudly
When they applied for a job how were they treated by Human Resources? Did HR seem genuinely happy to be talking to them and helping them through the process? Thankful that someone would be interested enough in your company to want to work there? Or were they made to feel like a checkbox among a litany of procedures? Like they were lucky to be even considered for a job?
How you treat these future employees directly establishes the overall tone of the organization, and demonstrates the value you place on your business relationships. This is their first impression, and how they are being ‘trained’ in the ways of your organization. Why should you expect them to treat your customers any differently than you have treated them? Culture is something you demonstrate through your actions, not something you build procedures around. A fake smile can be seen quite clearly over a telephone or a tweet.
Enter social media. An environment in which the pace, and its public nature, put your people and their communication skills on display like nothing that has ever come before it. An environment that requires people to use quick judgment, something that you don’t currently give them very much opportunity to use. You put those few people whose judgment you trust at the top of escalation ladders, and rely on process to bubble the problem children (your customers) up to them eventually. Yet that type of escalation process does not, and cannot, exist in social media.
Creating Scenarios
More and more you will be dependent upon trusting your front lines to exercise sound judgment. As a result, you’ll need a different kind of approach to inducting these people into your organization, because judgment is difficult to simply teach or train. It’s typically built upon experience, and experiential skills do not come cheaply or quickly. But there are ways to create experiences that can help hone and shape judgment and critical thinking skills. Scenario building exercises are one approach that can come in handy when dealing with cultural shifts within an organization.
Start by making a list of scenarios. Have your employees, particularly those on the front lines, contribute their own. Scenarios are simply “what if” statements:
What if our Facebook page is hijacked by an outside party?
What if a customer or employee is continually acting in a harassing manner?
Your employees will build and retain these micro case studies through both the process of devising the questions and the discussion of the appropriate solutions and responses. Let them contribute the ideas for how best to resolve the question. Let them debate amongst themselves the pros and cons of each and provide a helpful nudge in the right direction where necessary. Sound judgment requires an understanding of *why* an answer is the right answer, not simply knowing the answer itself. In the process of these exercises you may find that you end up with not only more valuable employees, but also ones that feel more valued.
And remember, the people on whose judgment you now have to depend started with a first impression of your company – through HR, reception, or elsewhere. That is the foundation upon which you have to build, and one that will form the basis for your employees’ investment in the work that you do. You can spend your energy shoring up a weak foundation, or building upon a strong one. That choice is yours.
I know for a fact, that whether on phone, twitter, email or in person, personality and demeanor can be everything. Having the proper part time/full time help makes all of the difference. It makes it easier on me to know that if I am not here that a part time worker can access the admin panel of the website to help a customer, or to handle a live chat account with Mr. Grinch on the other end. Good article.
We’ve got to shake loose this mindset that only the “official spokespeople” for a company are the ones that can impact impressions, whether it’s with employees or customers. That kind of filter just isn’t in place anymore, and the sheer speed and agility of the web means that we have to change not just the way we train and educate people, but most likely who we hire in the first place.
Is everyone going to be suited to customer interactions and problem solving? No. But the tools of the real-time web are far more nimble than a phone or an email account, and lines between individual representatives and the reputation of the brand are blurring more rapidly than ever. You and I have talked about this a million times but the root of all of this is in the culture of a company. No business shift we’ve seen, I don’t think, has exposed the importance of culture more than today’s.
And wow, it’s sure obvious when culture is pervasive, or when it’s a surface treatment isn’t it? But it’s also much harder to change a culture with a manual and a new set of processes and systems…
Part of the solution is transparency, but not in the way we typically think of it. We have to expose and educate our employees to the inner workings of our businesses. Isolating their experience to their immediate surroundings is no longer acceptable. The only way employees can make the same types of decisions as you is if they have available to them the same information. This, in itself, is a large cultural shift.
The largest barrier to this at the moment is simply that under this scenario these are more skilled employees with higher entry requirements. That costs more money to fill a role than it did yesterday, and those dollars have to come from somewhere. Do stronger, more effective customer focused relationships outweigh the additional cost to the consumer? In some industries that’s a much easier call to make than others. But I’m a believer that overall we’ll see a shift towards these organizations with more responsive/effective relationships over pure costs derived from efficiencies, even in commoditized markets.
Matt, thanks for the interesting thoughts. While in principle I agree with the style of approach, I believe that the starting point shouldn’t be experience but values. An organisation is a group of people brought together by shared values to achieve something for the benefit of customers who also share those values. So my first “filter” would be scenarios that allow potential members of the organisation to discover whether they truly share the values of the organisation and its customers.
This also means much better definition of what the values of the organisation truly are, which is a whole other issue in most organisations.
Amber, you’re quite right about the “spokesperson” approach. It is an unfortunate by-product of the work of communications professionals dealing with mainstream media (I was one for years and am as guilty as anyone else). Unfortunately the profession did such a good job convincing CEO and business leaders of the need for the “official spokesperson” that this concept became almost a mantra. It has been applied across organisations because many people have difficulty distinguishing between who can speak in one scenario from another scenario. They prefer consistency and simple rules.
Communications professionals got caught up in communications and reputation, at the expense of relationships. Almost a decade ago, when I worked with a University to help reinvigorate its communication degrees, one of the first steps we took was to redefine the profession in terms of creating, maintaining and improving relationships.
Again I think if the culture of an organisation is based on the shared values of the people who make up that organisation (incl customers, clients), there will be more effective interactions. Relationships, reputation and communication tend to follow.
Cheers, geoff
Thanks for the comments Geoff. I do think the running of these types of scenarios exposes and reinforces the organizations values. I don’t see values as some separate entity however. If the scenarios are being guided, and reasoning is provided as part of the answers, the values being applied should be implicit. It’s generally through experiencing how values are applied within the framework of a specific set of roles that an employee learns the true meaning of those values. If you work at Google, then “Do no evil” sounds great….but what does that mean in practice to each of those hundreds of different roles the employees have? What does ‘evil’ mean to you? to the organization? to the customer?
We all can say we ‘share’ the same stated values, but that’s very different than each of us perceiving that statement the same way, so to me these are experiential concepts that one must see in practice. And to your point, hopefully the scenarios are built in such a way to provide that and expose the values as early in the induction process as possible.
Matt, thanks for the reply. We certainly use the same techniques. And your point about the perception of the meaning of values is very important. I suppose that we recommend to clients the need to be explicit about the values, giving greater emphasis to help make them more real and maeningful for everyone in the organisation. We also use both external and internal scenarios to explore values.
Cheers, geoff
Matt, when I began reading the first few paragraphs of your post, I was like, “This is great, dead-on!” then as I continued reading, I was like, “Oy vey!”
You couldn’t be more right with your observations on a company’s first point of contact; the “front lines”. As a former Director of Sales in the catering/hospitality industry, this was a vital part of our daily operations. But as you started getting into the whole “scenario building exercises” thing, I think you touched on one of the reasons many companies don’t have a sound social media program in place.
The type of hiring needed to establish a frontline staff with the ability to make quick, sound judgements (very specialized & time-consuming) is costly. Secondly, the amount of time & resources (not to mention $$$) needed for effective “scenario building exercises” can take weeks, even months. Those types of resources are usually found only in larger corporations, which is why, when you look at the list of the most “social” companies, they are usually Fortune 500 companies.
I know, I know, most people will say: “But think about what your return on investment can be!” Unfortunately, social media is still hit or miss and there are enough different social media platforms to make a SVP’s head spin. Ultimately, if you’re talking social media for “business”, then it’s all about ROI, yes?
The smaller companies would best invest their time in sales training & product knowledge because at the end of the day, people that know their product well and know how to sell it, will make sales, yes? Social media isn’t gonna change that one bit because that formula ain’t broke nor does it need fixing.
I’m sure there are a handful of small companies that have invested the time, money & resources in the type of trainings you’ve outlined in your post but the social media game is still a game most effectively played by those companies with the bigger budgets. In the meantime, the smaller companies and the very small (like mine) will just have to do the best we can with the limited resources we have at our disposal to be as creative as we can to use social media to help grow our businesses. Thank God the twitterverse is “littered” with so much free information 🙂
Bro-hug.
Thanks Dan. There’s no doubt that I wrote this from the perspective of the larger organization. In my opinion it’s actually the smaller organizations that are more social by default, and have less need of these efforts. Specifically, I attribute that to having such close contact between the top and bottom of the organizations personnel. It’s much easier to apply judgment when you have a good feel for what the top dog would want. 🙂
The real struggle is in mid-size businesses, but to put it simply, regardless of size or budget every ‘person’ working in every company should always ask themselves ‘what would I do if…’. That was true before social media, and should be true with it. It just rarely happens.
Matt, thanks for the post. I am moderating the SMChat tomorrow and the topic is the challenges of employee engagement. Your comments here are absolutely outstanding. Amber I appreciate your response below and the sentiment of we have to move away from official spokesperson. Spot on. And then there is the whole “controlling the message thing”
The concept of the scenarios is brilliant on several levels thanks so much for providing additional depth and insight to my prep for the chat.
Have you seen the putting employees first video on You Tube? The Indian company? It is pretty cool.
Thanks again.
Thanks for the kind comments Joseph, I hope the SMChat goes well. I have not seen the video but will look it up so thanks for the pointer.
Cheers.
Matt this is the link i was talking about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukahcuczh5M there are others this one is brief and to the point. Thanks again.
Really, really like that Joseph. Many thanks.
Asking people to do big picture thinking (like “disaster” planning) would be a big step forward in inviting all corners of an organization to feel engaged, and responsible for the day to day success of their business.
And yet…
It feels like a lot of companies are in transition from happy fuzzy friendly-HR to down and dirty “engage or self-eliminate.” What’s to be done with those in any group who choose the latter path and decide their appropriate level of participation is mutely taking orders?
I think what’s important is that those people who are placed in ‘engage’ roles where real-time decision making is required (e.g. social media) are prepared to be in that role, and all that goes along with that. This is really about segmentation more than ‘self-eliminate’, as there are still plenty of traditional ‘mute order takers (really, processors)’ within the most progressive of companies. What we *cannot* do is push people without the skillsets or the tools into a new position of responsibility and then scream foul if they aren’t successful at it. Customer Service is not a blanket role. Within it are many, many different levels of engagement, responsibility, and skills. Same goes for HR/Recruiting/Admin Assistants/Receptionist/etc. Social Media simply adds a new layer to these functions, but it also adds a new filter by which those roles should be measured against prior to being on the ‘front line’ where social media is concerned.
That certainly does make the argument that not every organization “needs” a Community Manager type position. If Social Media is described as a filter or a means (like the telephone or email) rather than a platform (like television or radio), it makes a better distinction for companies to use in order to plan ahead.
And may, come to think of it, prevent a lot of needless thrash. I’ve already heard of at least one company developing a social media manager role and immediately closing the position out because it was unnecessary.
I have a hate/hate relationship with the word Social ‘Media’. Social is a mentality, a construct. It’s simply the next evolution (on the marketing side) of Relationship Marketing, and of collaboration internally, etc. The balancing of the scales between consumer and provider that has long been in the making. I could devise a ‘social program’ out of email easily enough if I wanted.
The tools/platforms are the *least* important thing, yet it is where we focus first. If history has shown us anything it is that they will not exist in their current forms in the relatively near future. Get the concept down. Understand its cultural and sociological impact on the constituents involved. Then, and only then, should we look to tool selection for execution. Sorry, I feel a rant coming on, so I’ll leave it there 🙂
Very interesting point, Matt. People are so focused on the company’s outward “first impression” that I’m not sure many people are thinking about the first impression new employees might receive. If your company is perceived as being lazy, careless, irresponsible, or disorganized, new folks will fall directly in line, and the ramifications could be long-lasting and severe. Definitely an important message to think about!
I really like the idea of planning ahead. Knowing how to handle situations can help with how customer thinks about the company from the smallest problem all the way to the most giant meltdown that could occur.
This also shows that you care about every detail which is very good for a company